The suite was large enough to look expensive, and cold enough to be honest.
Floor-to-ceiling windows revealed black water and the streaks of light from the harbour. In the background, the arena lay like a glass foreign body on the edge of the night. On a low table stood two untouched glasses, an ice bucket and an open bottle that someone had ordered without really intending to drink.
Ilya had taken off his jacket. Shirt, dark trousers, loosened tie — as if even elegance had been nothing more than a form of armour here, one that could be cast aside for ten minutes.
There was no second knock.
Ilya opened the door.
Shane stood there, still in his half-open team coat, his face still lit up by the evening yet exhausted at the same time. He glanced briefly past Ilya into the suite, as if he had to check whether anything else was lurking in there besides them.
Ilya said, “You’re late.”
“Ten minutes was tight.”
Ilya stepped aside. Shane went in. The door closed behind him.
For a moment, neither of them said a word. The silence in the room was the opposite of the hubbub in the ballroom. No music and no clinking of glasses. Just the air conditioning, the sound of water outside, and the reminder that downstairs, an evening was still going on that had long since bored them both.
Shane made an effort to hang his coat on the coat rack calmly. Ilya handed him an ice-cold ginger ale from the fridge.
Shane thanked him: “So you do remember?” He looked out of the windows. “You always book rooms as if, just in case, you were planning a coup d’état in them.”
Ilya said: “You never know who you might have to sleep with in a room like that.”
A bashful smile played around Shane’s mouth. Ilya went to the table, picked up the bottle, hesitated briefly, and put it down. Instead, he poured himself some red wine from the decanter.
Shane said, “Did you want me to have a good cry about the defeat at your place?”
“So, are you going to cry for the Commonwealth?”
Shane set down his glass of ginger ale and said, “You’ll have to check that carefully.”
Another one of those pauses fell, which would have been a sign of uncertainty in other people but was simply a habit for them. Ilya stepped closer. For a moment, mockery turned to understanding. Ilya raised a hand, touched Shane’s collar and smoothed the fabric of his shirt slightly, as if merely correcting something that was disrupting the room. Shane remained silent. They were now close enough that there was little left standing between conversation and something else.
Ilya asked what had been going on upstairs.
Shane said, “Denmark. The Russian woman in green wanted to negotiate with me.”
A tiny shadow lay in Ilya’s gaze. “If she didn’t manage to get you, she’s boring.” Ilya didn’t expect an answer; instead, he pulled Shane the rest of the way towards him and kissed him with precisely the restraint that always seemed like a mistake to both of them at first, before it became a habit. Shane responded immediately. The kiss tipped into intimacy, into practised familiarity, into that old, poorly digested knowledge of one another. Hands on fabric, on shoulders, on necks. Not tenderly restrained, but rather with that swift precision that arose when two men didn’t have to explain to each other where the weak spots lay.
Ilya pulled his jacket off. Shane pushed Ilya’s shirt collar back. The bed was too wide to be an alternative.
For a few minutes, the evening downstairs was far away.
No Stromberg. No Ravn. No woman in green. No Danish ice ballet on plastic waste. Just breath, body heat, the cold of the room and that almost aggressive familiarity that one mistook for comfort when one had no time for anything more honest.
Shane then leaned against the chest of drawers in the entrance hall, his eyes closed briefly, the tension visibly eased for the first time since the evening had begun. He was breathing heavily. Ilya finally took the bottle, opened the vodka with his back to Shane, and drank.
Shane looked at him, calmer now: “That was either a good idea or an exceptionally bad one.”
“If you don’t know that, it wasn’t as good as it just looked. You’re welcome to use my shower before you go back down to reception.”
Shane nodded and hurried into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. When he returned shortly afterwards, having had a shower, Ilya was lying on the bed, playing with his mobile phone.
Then Shane noticed something. First, the strange feeling in the room. His coat was no longer hanging where he’d left it, just slightly out of place. Shane sat up slowly.
“Ilya?”
Ilya casually took another sip of vodka and didn’t look up from his mobile phone.
“What is it?”
Shane moved closer, picked up the trousers, which were hanging neatly folded over the arm of the chair, and pulled them on, as if he needed to shield himself from Ilya’s gaze. Then he reached into the pocket, pulled out his mobile phone, reached into the other pocket and found: nothing.
His expression changed. Anger turned to disappointment.
“Did you take something out of my trousers while I was in the shower?” he asked.
Ilya had now stood up as well. “No.”
Shane laughed once, briefly, harshly and incredulously. 
Ilya began: “But I would have, if you’d still had the puck in there.”
Shane asked, “Did you lure me here to empty his pockets? Did you sleep with me to distract me?”
Ilya didn’t answer straight away. An awkward pause. Shane saw that.
“Wow!” said Shane. He didn’t say anything else for the time being. That was enough.
Ilya took a step closer and said, “I wanted to stop you from running around with something you don’t understand.”
Shane replied, “You could have just asked me.”
Ilya asked, “Would you have given it to me, then?”
Shane looked at him. That question hurt more than any explanation.
“I don’t know. But at least I would have decided for myself.”
Ilya accepted that; he had to accept it.
Meanwhile, Shane searched the room, not in a panic—too angry for panic: the table, the armchair, the floor, the duvet. He knelt briefly on the carpet, looked under the table, as if the evening might at least turn out to be so mundane that a puck had simply rolled away.
Shane asked: “When did you realise it was gone?”
“I searched your robe while you were in the shower.”
Shane sat up. “And before that you… so that I’d go and have a shower? That’s disgusting!”
Ilya looked away from Shane in embarrassment. “I need the puck that crazy Dane gave you.”
“For the Soviet Union?”
“For your life!”
Shane retraced the evening’s events in his mind. You could see it in his face. Ballroom. Woman in green. Sponsor meeting. Match. Shower. Then he stopped.
“The woman from Hesse with the shoulder pads!” he said.
Ilya was instantly alert and asked, “Which Hessian woman?”
Shane described her: “When I came out of the changing room, she was just coming out of the ladies’ toilet, but down by the athletes’ changing rooms. I didn’t notice at first, but it is strange for a guest to wander down there. She could have taken the thing out of her trousers while we were showering. Just like you’ve just tried to do.”
“You could start noticing things before they go missing.”
“And you could stop putting me to bed for making things go missing.”
The sentence hung in the room. Sharp enough that even the air conditioning sounded louder for a moment. Ilya said nothing, because there was nothing to defuse.
Shane ran both hands over his face, then through his hair, and tried to sort out his anger.
“Anya knew you had it, and she wants it at any cost. If we divert Anya’s attention to the Hessian woman now, that might save you.”
Shane looked back at the mobile phone on the table. “Who is she really?”
“She says Rosatom; I suspect SWR.”
Shane asked, “SWR?”
Ilya explained, “Slushba vneshnej razvedki, the Soviet foreign intelligence service.”
Shane snorted bitterly and said, “First I couldn’t understand what a Russian woman wanted from me, and then I let a Russian man search me, who supposedly wants to protect me. “
He reached for his shirt, pulled it on, not quite fastening it. The armour returned, visibly piece by piece.
Shane asked: “Where are you going?”
“To her.”
“To the Russian woman?”
“Yes.”
Shane asked: “Is this suddenly going to be professional after what’s happened here?”
Ilya replied: “Everything tonight is professional. From marine ecology, to the princess, the World Energy Organisation, the Bear Year cohort of the Leopoldine Military Grammar School, right down to the two of us. That’s exactly the problem.”
Ilya buttoned up his shirt and explained: “If I’m reading Anya correctly, she’ll take you out of the game as soon as she knows you no longer have the puck. If I’m reading her wrong, we’ve got another problem.”
Shane repeated: “We?”
Ilya looked at him.
“Yes.”
Despite everything, despite what had just happened, despite the bags and despite the lie. Shane hated that this one word still had an effect on him.
“And me?” asked Shane, “Am I supposed to wait here?”
Ilya merely nodded: “Yes.”
He took his jacket and key card. He paused once more at the door. “Shane.”
Shane didn’t look up. 
“I’m sorry.”
Shane didn’t reply until Ilya already had the door handle in his hand: “I don’t know if I’ll be waiting here.”
Ilya gave a barely perceptible nod and left. The door closed. Shane was left alone in the suite, between the harbour lights, two untouched glasses and the realisation that tonight he’d been used first as a courier and then as bait. He didn’t want to sound so bitter, but he didn’t want to always be the fool either.
He didn’t sit down. He walked to the window, looked down at the water, then at the arena in red and white, as if either of them could explain to him exactly how a souvenir puck had turned the whole evening on its head. Then he too picked up his shirt and put it on. “Damn.”